Wireless security settings

[Kenyth]

Many of us use wireless for our home connections and some at our jobs, so I thought this would be of interest. There was recently an announcement that WPA encryption had been cracked. Later, it was more specifically narrowed to WPA using the pre-shared key method or WPA-PSK. This is the primary wireless encryption security method available without some type of authentication server or digital certificate method, and is used in most homes and small businesses. The good news is that the "crack" is not as bad as it seems. The crack is aimed at the pre-shared key portion of the authenticating transmission. The PSK is what get's you started in the WPA link, though the actual encryption keys keep changing. It's kind of like a password. The crack is simply a brute force dictionary attack on the PSK, which is user generated. If you use a regular word, or combination of words as your PSK, it will almost certainly be vulnerable. The answer is, like any other password, to make it as long, complex, and random as possible. The maximum length is 32 characters, and 12 ASCII characters using letters, numbers, upper case, and punctuation should be used at a minimum. The computing power and time needed to crack a truly random 32 character ASCII PSK key is phenomenal. So there's no need for the average home user, or even average business to be terribly concerned as long as they use a sufficiently complex PSK along with standard security measures on the PC's, like a properly configured firewall, an NTFS filesystem, limited administrative access, changing or disabling the default "administrator" account, individual accounts with changing passwords, etc.